RAHUL KHANNA

“Out of all the things that baf­fle me about women, the num­ber- one is their purses. Firstly, hand­bags have be­come the new jew­ellery and cost as much or more than di­a­monds. For some rea­son, I can’t help but mea­sure purses in the value of Tata Nanos. When a wo­man men­tions how much her de­signer purse cost, I think, ‘ Holy Fendi, she’s car­ry­ing five Nanos on her arm’. Then, I imag­ine it and it makes me chuckle. They’re ei­ther the size of check- in lug­gage or postage- stamp tiny; you need to ob­serve care­fully to no­tice them. I have seen women car­ry­ing around tiny sparkly ob­jects that re­sem­ble, I could swear, the lit­tle fig­urines you see in the show win­dows of old Parsi rel­a­tives’ homes. Ap­par­ently, these purses have se­cret latches that pop

“A bath­room isn’t my idea of a so­cial venue and the last place I want com­pany. Yet, I haven’t seen a wo­man go

alone.”

open and are like a ma­gi­cian’s hat be­cause, no mat­ter what the size, women’s purses are filled with vast quan­ti­ties of mys­te­ri­ous trin­kets and trea­sures. They con­tain every­thing you could pos­si­bly need— fists full of Splenda, a shot of peni­cillin, a copy of War And Peace, the por­tal to a par­al­lel di­men­sion. How­ever, there is one thing they will never have and that is a tis­sue when you’re about to sneeze. There have been in­nu­mer­able in­stances when I can feel a sneeze mea­sur­ing at least five points on the Richter scale com­ing on and I throw a look of des­per­ate hope to a wo­man with a gi­gan­tic purse. On ev­ery oc­ca­sion, she dives into the in­ner depths of the bag, comes up with a ca­sual shake of her head and a shrug, leav­ing me to deal with my own nasal tsunami.

The other thing I don’t get about women is why they go to the loo in packs. A bath­room is not my idea of a so­cial venue and the last place I want com­pany. But yet, I have never seen a wo­man go to the bath­room alone. There’s some­thing very con­spir­a­to­rial about the whole thing. Af­ter spend­ing an in­or­di­nate amount of time in­side, they emerge with smug looks on their faces, fas­ten­ing their purses and ad­just­ing their dresses. To me, bath­rooms are mag­i­cal wonderlands with cham­pagne foun­tains and uni­corns hand­ing out hand tow­els. What goes on in there? Are they putting their spy equip­ment into their bags af­ter avert­ing a World War? Or, and this is most ter­ri­fy­ing, are they dis­cussing men?!”